My best memories from the University have to do with people. I came to know both my best friends and my future husband, Atro Kahiluoto, in the smoking room of the University Main Building. All through upper-secondary school, I had lived in a small village where I was the only young weirdo who loved poetry, Russian classics, and philosophy. At university I met fellow spirits and moved in with them. We named our common apartment “Kaivo ja Tähti” ('The Well and the Star'), partly after the street address, partly after a classic of 19th century Finnish literature. We set up discussion groups on aesthetics, literature, and philosophy, and through the years we ran various study groups. I remember belonging to study groups on Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Nietzsche, at least.

Before the depression of the 1990s, hardly any of us thought of what we were going to do after graduation. When I enrolled to study general literature, our professor warned us new students about graduating too fast and leaving too many gaps in our education.

During the depression of the 1990s, the idea of the bottom-line was introduced to the University under the government productivity scheme. Administrators were let go, teachers were assigned office duties, time sheets were introduced. Year after year we produced more theses with fewer staff, but still our funds continued to be cut. So the trend of bleeding university funding has continued unabated since the late 1990s. I feel privileged simply because I was able to begin my studies at the Institute for Art Research before holistic academic education or art became hollow phrases in Finnish politics.

The most memorable moments in my research career were international seminars and working abroad. I am especially grateful for the field trips and seminars of the multidisciplinary research team of the Finnish Institute in Athens led by Kirsti Simonsuuri in 1998–2001, the seminar on Maurice Blanchot at the Sorbonne University immediately after his death in 2003, and the public defence of my dissertation, where they flew in the leading Blanchot scholar, Michael B. Holland, from Oxford University to be my opponent.